"Senate Panel Weighs Privacy Concerns Over Use of Drones"

How dangerous can those little drones be? - Senate Panel Weighs Privacy Concerns Over Use of Drones | New York Times nytimes.com/2013/03/21/us/…
— Kenneth D. Pimple (@Ethical_PICT) March 21, 2013

"Domestic Drones Stir Imaginations, and Concerns"

From the new Twitter feed:

Not mostly about killing, but still ... - Domestic Drones Stir Imaginations, and Concerns | The New York Times nyti.ms/Wxjz1S
— Kenneth D. Pimple (@Ethical_PICT) March 18, 2013

Call for Abstracts: Governance of Emerging Technologies

Call for Abstracts

Governance of Emerging Technologies: Law, Policy and Ethics

May 20-21, 2013

Chandler, Arizona

The Center for Law, Science & Innovation at the Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law at Arizona State University has issued a call for abstracts for proposed presentations at its upcoming First Annual Conference on Emerging Technologies: Law, Policy and Ethics.  Eleven other organizations from across the nation with an interest in emerging technologies are co-sponsoring this path-breaking event.

The national conference is slated for May 20-21 at the scenic Sheraton Wild Horse Pass Resort & Spa in Chandler, Ariz., just south of downtown Phoenix. Abstracts are due March 1, and should be submitted at law.asu.edu/emergingtechnologies. Successful applicants will be notified by March 22.

The conference will consist of plenary and session presentations and discussions on regulatory, governance, legal, policy, social and ethical aspects of emerging technologies, including, but not limited to, nanotechnology, synthetic biology, biotechnology, genomics, personalized medicine, stem cell and regenerative medicine, human enhancement technologies, telecommunications, information technologies, surveillance technologies, geoengineering, neuroscience and robotics.

Keynote speakers include George M. Church, Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School and Director of PersonalGenomes.org, George Poste, Co-director and Chief Scientist, Complex Adaptive Systems Network, Regents' Professor and Del E. Webb Chair in Health Innovation, ASU, and Andrew D. Maynard, NSF International Chair of Environmental Health Sciences, and Director, University of Michigan Risk Science Center.

There is much to be learned and shared from and across the governance experience and proposals for these various emerging technologies, said Gary Marchant, Faculty Director of the Center for Law, Science & Innovation.

"What's clear is that for every single technology – from nanotechnology and neuroscience to robotics and surveillance technologies – the way we regulate them and their risks is not working," Marchant said. "Traditional forms of regulation fail because they lag so far behind the science. These technologies are going forward at an unprecedented pace, and they cut across many different industries and sectors. And the set of governance issues they raise are of unprecedented diversity and importance."

An example is autonomous weapons systems, which are capable of accomplishing military and other missions with little or no human intervention. "We are on the verge of having the technological capability to enable robots to make decisions about killing people, but we don't yet have in place any principles or methods for governing this capability," Marchant said. "We need to look at both the substance – what is the ethical thing to do? – and the process – how do we make these decisions in society? We will be exploring these issues at our conference."

The conference will bring together government regulators, technology innovators, scientists and engineers, scholars from law, public policy, philosophy and ethics, policymakers, non-governmental organizations, students and journalists.

Participants will have a unique opportunity to explore the challenges that cut across many fields, the convergence of emerging technologies, and the societal impact of a bewildering array of transformative tools and techniques, said Wendell Wallach, of the Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics at Yale University, a co-sponsor of the conference.

"We have entered a critical juncture," Wallach said. "There are still opportunities to provide direction as to which technological possibilities should be embraced and those potential harms that must be addressed. But some of the opportunities to effectively monitor, manage and modulate the emerging technologies will disappear relatively soon."

Multidisciplinary discourse, creative thinking and innovative approaches are fundamental to striking an appropriate balance between the risks and rewards, said Diana Bowman, Assistant Professor, University of Michigan Risk Science Center and the Department of Health Management and Policy. The Risk Science Center also is sponsoring the conference.

"Autonomous vehicles – drone warfare – sophisticated materials for tissue engineering – what once belonged only in the pages of science fiction is very much science fact today," Bowman said. "And with the promise of new, emerging and disruptive technologies on the horizon, our capacity to grapple with the legal, policy and societal issues posed by the promised applications shall be challenged."

Additional sponsors of the conference are the Center for Nanotechnology in Society at ASU; the Lincoln Center for Applied Ethics at ASU; The Hastings Center; Institute for Ethics & Emerging Technologies; Initiative on Governance of Emerging Technological Systems, University of Minnesota; Ethics & Emerging Sciences Group, California Polytechnic State University; Neuroethics Studies Program, Center for Clinical Bioethics, Georgetown University Medical Center; The Science & Technology Innovation Program, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars; and Center for Earth Systems Engineering and Management, Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering at ASU.  For additional sponsorship opportunities, email gary.marchant@asu.edu. For more information about the conference and to register, visit law.asu.edu/emergingtechnologies.

About the Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law

Arizona State University's Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law is one of the leading public law schools in the country. Currently ranked No. 26 nationally by U.S. News & World Report, and No. 8 among all public law schools, the College has moved up further and faster in national rankings than nearly any other law school. The College is the preeminent law school in metropolitan Phoenix, the nation's sixth-largest city. In addition to its renowned faculty, the College is home to several leading centers and programs recognized for excellence, including the Center for Law, Science & Innovation, the Center for Law and Global Affairs and the Indian Legal Program. Its students choose and benefit from numerous opportunities for experiential and practical-skills training as well as an array of theoretical courses. With a writing program that is ranked No. 8 nationally by U.S. News, a wide range of clinical opportunities, a breadth of externship offerings, and a pro bono program that annually contributes more than 100,000 hours of legal and law-related services to the community, the Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law is pursuing a path of boundless impact, excellence, engagement and opportunity. For more information, visit law.asu.edu. 

"The Snails of War"

Future headline: "PETA protests robotics facility."

Or has that already happened?

It isn't surprising that researchers with an eye on funding from DARPA are trying to create "tiny, self-powered animal/machine hybrids as an alternative to tiny robots" ("The snails of war"" by James Gorman, New York Times March 20, 2012). Insects and other small critters already know how to move and sense things and whatnot. All you have to do to make them into weapons or surveillance tools is create some kind of controlling mechanism, a power supply for the electronics, and suitable hardware (weapons, microphones, whatever). Eventually the technology will be commercialized (probably with surveillance, but not weapons) and everyone will want a iSlug.

It's a strange world where the potential for military applications can make the strangest of dreams come true. Or maybe I'm just strange to think it is.

Ken Pimple, PAIT Project Director

"Cars that drive themselves"

Always at the cutting edge of risky behavior, Nevada has "released draft rules to govern self-driving cars, which it has approved for testing on its public roads" (Cars that drive themselves, MSN Money, February 22, 2012). The car will have to have a sober, licensed driver behind the wheel. But it'll be legal to text while driving.

Thanks to Donald Searing for bringing this to my attention.

Ken Pimple, PAIT Project Director

"Robotics: Morals and machines"

This book review by Braden Allenby (Nature 481:26-27, January 5 2012) covers Robot Ethics: The Ethical and Social Implications of Robotics, ed. Patrick Lin, Keith Abney, and George A. Bekey (MIT Press: 2011). Allenby characterizes the book as "a timely round-up of sensible ethical and policy responses to advances in robot technology" and notes (among other good qualities) that the book "succeeds as a stand-alone text, with its varied contributors striving for objectivity and avoiding hyperbole."

I'll be ordering my copy soon.

Ken Pimple, PAIT Project Director

"The Future of Moral Machines"

This article by Indiana University professor Colin Allen (New York Times, December 25, 2011) is a clearly-written and engaging short introduction to the controversies surrounding "moral" machines.

I made the mistake of reading a few of the comments written by Times readers, the majority of whom seem to have either misunderstood the article or not bothered to read beyond the title. One wonders why people so disdainful of the New York Times and/or philosophy would torment themselves by reading the Times' "forum for contemporary philosophers on issues both timely and timeless" known as "The Stone."

At any rate, I do recommend that you read and enjoy the article itself.

Ken Pimple, PAIT Project Director

Mind-controlled robots, the Supreme Court on GPS, Wii without a wand, and computers that write

A small avalanche of PAIT-related articles buried me this weekend; let me see whether I can dig my way out.

• Disabled Patients Mind-Meld With Robots by Sara Reardon (ScienceNOW, September 6, 2011) - Using Skype and wearing "a cap of tiny electroencephalogram (EEG) electrodes," two people "whose lower bodies were paralyzed and who had been bed bound for 6 or 7 years" controlled the movements of a modified commercial robot - Robotino -100 kilometers away. They used only their brain waves - no moving eyes, no twitching fingers. The paralyzed subjects had been trained for 1 hour a week for 6 weeks. The system had been tested earlier with non-paralyzed people, and the paralyzed subjects "performed just as well as the healthy subjects." Think of what this would mean to paralyzed people and their friends and families - it would be a miracle.
  
  My enthusiasm is, of course, always tempered by caution. The Hollywood version would have someone hack the system and take control of the robot to frame a paralyzed person for murder. My real concern, though, is accessibility. There's no mention in the article how much this rig would cost, and the manufacturer of Robotino, Festo Didactic, lists all of the prices associated with Robotino as "on request." I fear this is an instance of "if you have to ask the price, you can't afford it."


• Court Case Asks if ‘Big Brother’ Is Spelled GPS by Adam Liptak (New York Times, September 10, 2011) - At least three federal judges have compared the use of global positioning system (GPS) devices by police to George Orwell's novel, 1984. In November, the Supreme Count "will address a question that has divided the lower courts: Do the police need a warrant to attach a GPS device to a suspect’s car and track its movements for weeks at a time?"
  
  The answer seems obvious to me (hint: it begins with a "y"), but with the current court I'm not making any bets.


• Remote Control, With a Wave of a Hand by Anne Eisenberg (New York Times, September 10, 2011) - "Scientists at Microsoft Research and the University of Washington have come up with a new system that uses the human body as an antenna. The technology could one day be used to turn on lights, buy a ticket at a train station kiosk, or interact with a world of other computer applications. And no elaborate instruments would be required." No need for a Wii wand or the Kinect's cameras that track motion.
  
  Nothing is said about whether this technology could be used to identify and track specific individuals (is your repertoire of everyday gestures as distinctive as your face or fingerprints?).


• In Case You Wondered, a Real Human Wrote This Column, allegedly by Steve Lohr (New York Times, September 10, 2011) - I had heard some time ago about the effort to make computers write newspaper-style sports articles based solely on the statistics of the game. That such writing would soon be indistinguishable from prose written by a human sports writer I did not doubt. The time seems to be near.
  
  Somehow I can't get excited by this one.

Ken Pimple, PAIT Project Director

The allure of robots

It's been a long time since my last post, and it might be a long time before my next, due to time and deadline crunches. Just to let you know I'm still around, I'm sharing a link to a PAIT-related comic of PartiallyClips. My first thought on reading it: "One danger of advanced technology is that people expect too much from it."

Ken Pimple, PAIT Project Director

Online privacy; military gets hip; caterpillar robot; intelligent pricing

Four interesting items came to my attention yesterday and today:

• In the New York Times, Randall Stross supports opt-in rules for online data (Opt-In Rules Are a Good Start), meaning that no one should be allowed to gather or use your digital information without your consent. For too many sites, the best we can get is an opt-out option, which requires us to say, "Hey, don't do this;" or, more typically, "Hey, stop doing this." Not surprisingly, the proposed Commercial Privacy Bill of Rights Act of 2011 is supports an opt-out approach (we wouldn't want industry to be hampered by privacy concerns). Surprisingly, the article's poster child for opt-in is Facebook, which must have cleaned up its act while I wasn't looking.
• Also in the Times, Andrew Martin and Thomas Lin write that some senior officials in the United States military are pushing to start using, or increase the use of, smartphones, iPads, video games, and virtual worlds in military training (Keyboards First. Then Grenades). Other senior officials are opposed. But some of these technologies are already being used and have proven effective, and they are appealing to young recruits. The smart money is on increased use.
• ScienceNOW, a publication of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), has a wonderful video of a 10-centimeter/4-inch robot that mimics the escape behavior of some caterpillars (Video: Caterpillar-Inspired Robots Rock 'n' Roll). You've got to see it to believe it. From the video it appears the robot is still on wires (presumably for power or control), but it's only a matter of time before the military develops it for intelligence gathering or assassination.
• Finally, ScienceInsider, also a AAAS publication, reports that an out-of-print 1992 book on developmental biology available on Amazon.com recently offered "15 used from $35.54, and 2 new from $1,730,045.91 (+$3.99 shipping)" (The $23 Million Textbook). The biologist who noticed the outlandish price tracked changes for a while and noticed a pattern: "Whenever one seller changed the price of the book, the other seller reacted by offering the book at 99.83% of that price. In response, the first seller automatically started asking 127% of the other seller's new price - and so on. The price peaked on 18 April before a human being intervened and the prices came back to earth." The culprit was "algorithmic pricing." Thank goodness it wasn't used to order drone strikes.

Ken Pimple, PAIT Project Director

Robots on stage

The New York Times reports that "Heddatron," a play by Elizabeth Meriwether, will open in Chicago today. The cast includes ten robots.

Five large robots are controlled remotely by cast members sitting offstage, and the remaining five are very small, autonomous "critter-bots," which basically just zip around the stage for the last five minutes of the play. 

I'd love to see this play and write a review for this blog. Anyone want to give me a travel grant?

Ken Pimple, PAIT Project Director

Call for papers: Fourth Workshop on Roboethics

Fourth Workshop on Roboethics

May 13, 2011

CALL FOR PAPERS

Important dates:

• February 28, 2011: Paper submission deadline
• March 7, 2011: Notification of Acceptance/Rejection
• March 14, 2011: Camera-Ready Submission Deadline

Organizers: IEEE RAS Technical Committee on Roboethics

• Gianmarco Veruggio, CNR-¬‐IEIIT, Italy (corresponding co-chair)
• Jorge Solis, Waseda University, Japan (co-chair)
• Matthias Scheutz, Indiana University, USA (co-chair)

Scope: The proposed Full Day Workshop on Roboethics is the fourth biennial event, organized by the Technical Committee on Roboethics as part of the ICRA conference (previous workshops took place in 2005, 2007 and 2009). Roboethics is ethics applied to robotics, i.e., the human-centered ethics guiding the design, construction and use of robots. It deals with the study of the ethical, legal and social aspects of the introduction and use of robots in our daily lives. Progress in the field of computer science and telecommunications allows us to endow machines with enough intelligence so that they already can act autonomously (to some degree). However, as the application domains for robots are increasing and robots are coming out of the factory halls, robotics research is increasingly raising ethical implications, related to the emerging interactions between robots and human beings.

Roboethics shares many "sensitive areas" with computer ethics, information ethics, bioethics and not only roboticists, but also sociologists, psychologists and philosophers are discussing the potentialities and limits of robotics to help building a better human society.

This workshop will increase robotics researchers' ethical awareness, in the context of the ever growing interdisciplinarity that characterizes the new generation of robotics research.

Goal: The theme of the ICRA 2011 conference is "Better Robots, Better Life", an expectation that robot technology will help build a better human society. But achieving this goal is not only a technical problem. Robotics applications raise ethical questions, related to emerging interactions between robots and humans. The application of ethics to machines, including robots and computer programs, has been typically limited the questions of whether designers and operators should take full responsibility of machines' actions. However, in the near future, the robotics is already developing machines with more open-ended behaviors and the ability to acquire new behaviors as a results of online learning during task execution. This kind of adaptation will likely limit the predictability of robot behaviors. Moreover, the types of interactions and the physical integrations of humans and robots are increasing rapidly. The social, economic, psychological, philosophical, and emotional impacts of this research are still unclear, however, and require careful analysis and attention by the research community. Among the objectives of the workshop is the opportunity of developing rules for roboethical quality insurance, aimed at preventing unethical uses of robotics research products. Long-term objectives include the increase of robotics researchers' ethical awareness, in the context of the ever growing interdisciplinarity that will characterize the new generation of robotics research.

Topics: Contributions are welcome on (but not limited to) the ethical, legal and societal aspects of the following topics:

• robot ethics (decision procedures/algorithms for moral behavior)
• technical dependability (availability; reliability; safety; security)
• military application of robotics (acceptability, advantages and risks, codes)
• health (robotics in surgery; robotics in health care, assistance, prosthetics and therapy)
• service (social robotics, personal assistants, companions)
• economy (replacing humans in the workplace; robotics and the job market)
• psychology (position of humans in the control hierarchy; robots and children)
• law (robots and liability; deployment of autonomously acting robots)
• environment (sustainable exploitation of resources; cleaning nuclear and toxic waste)

For more information, please see the web page at http://www.roboethics.org/icra2011/

Interested authors are encouraged to send their original contributions in the above or related areas to the organizers at info@roboethics.org

Extended abstracts (of two pages) or full papers of up to 6 pages (using the ICRA conference publication format) are welcome.

Robot hands, robot guards

Two snippets on robots:

• An article in ScienceNOW (Oct. 25, 2010) describes a new robotic "hand" that can pour the contents of a glass into a mug and draw a square with a pen. The hand has no fingers. It's a "thin rubber sack filed with coffee grains or small glass spheres." When its flexible surface is pushed onto an object, a pipe in the hand's "wrist" sucks out some air, and voilà! the sack contracts and can lift the object. There's a nice video to illustrating its use. This hand is another example of how imitating humans might not be the best way to design robots - mimicking the human hand has not been very successful so far.

• An article in the New York Times (Nov. 3, 2010) describes the increasing appeal (and decreasing cost) of using toy robots that can be remotely controlled via the Internet to keep an eye on one's home. The robots are relatively inexpensive and typically can move around the house and send sights and sounds to the remote user. The Times article mentions the entertainment value of these robots, but emphasizes their use as a security system. To me, they look more like an insecurity system; our family, at least, would feel more anxious going out of town leaving a robot behind that we could use to check on our house. We can't check it now, so we don't think about it. Make it possible to check for trouble and we'll frequently think about trouble. I'll pass.

Ken Pimple, PAIT Project Director

"Google Cars Drive Themselves, in Traffic"

Similar stories to this one from the New York Times appeared elsewhere. The last I had heard, self-driving cars would require a retrofit of roads. (I don't remember when or where I read that; it might have been 30 years ago in one of my father's issues of Popular Mechanics.) Google's approach seems more feasible, though how feasible that makes it in absolute terms I couldn't say.

The obvious concerns about this technology include safety and reliability, as well as hacking (imagine kidnapping, or killing, someone by taking over her or his car; in fact, it might be an effective way to frame someone).

Perhaps less obvious: Will self-driven cars get better gas mileage? Will Americans put up with them, even if they prove safer than human-driving cars? Will they be the end of the designated driver?

Ken Pimple, PAIT Project Director

"How to Train Your Robot (to Lie)"

In an earlier entry I expressed my discontent with our current terminology about robots - specifically, that we use the word "robot" to cover too many distinct types of artifacts. This article from ScienceNow illustrates another problem with how we talk about robots, somewhat reminiscent of Jaron Lanier's concerns over The First Church of Robotics.

The claim in the article's title is that a robot has been taught how to lie, but it has only learned how to lay a false trail. This can be seen as deception, or misdirection, or perhaps even camouflage - all of which can be seen in non-human animals and even plants - but hardly lying. No doubt the work represents a breakthrough, but is the hyped-up language necessary or productive? Am I the only one who thinks longingly of the days when science news was a bit more sober and restrained?

Ken Pimple, PAIT Project Director

"The Boss Is Robotic, and Rolling Up Behind You"

This article from the New York Times (September 4) is worth a look, if only for the graphic of 5 similar robots and a couple of useful videos of the robots in action. These robots are essentially video conferencing tools on wheels, remotely operated by one person (whose face typically appears on the robot's screen) from an ordinary desktop computer.

The appeal of this technology in certain settings is obvious: An entrepreneur with offices and staff in two or more cities can meet with his staff daily without having to travel; a physician can assist in a health clinic hundreds of miles away. I don't think these robots will become ubiquitous, though.

The terminology bothers me a bit, though. I wish that we had widely-used terminology that could distinguish between, for example, factory robots that are bolted in place and perform well-defined and highly patterned movements; mobile robots with some choice-making capacity but very few functions (the Roomba^® is a good example); remote-controlled mobile devices like the ones described in this article; and fully mobile machines with good deal of choice-making capacity. There might be other categories of which I am unaware (or not bringing to mind just now. I also think it would be useful to distinguish between human-shaped (humanoid) robots, robots so human-like that they could be mistaken for a person (think C3PO vs Data), and non-humanoid robots (R2D2).

If you know of such terminology, please post a comment sharing it with me and the readers of this blog.

Ken Pimple, PAIT Project Director

Call for papers: Ethics and Affective Computing

Call for Papers

IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing

Special Issue on Ethics and Affective Computing

The pervasive presence of automated and autonomous systems necessitates the rapid growth of a relatively new area of inquiry called machine ethics. If machines are going to be turned loose on their own to kill and heal, explore and decide, the need for designing them to be moral becomes pressing. This need, in turn, penetrates to the very foundations of ethics as robot designers strive to build systems that comply. Fuzzy intuitions will not do when computational clarity is required. So, machine ethics also asks the discipline of ethics to make itself clear. The truth is that at present we do not know how to make it so. Rule-based approaches are being tried even in light of an acknowledged difficulty to formalize moral behavior, and it is already common to hear that introducing affects into machines may be necessary in order to make machines behave morally. From this perspective, affective computing may be morally required by machine ethics.

On the other hand, building machines with artificial affects might carry with it negative ethical consequences. In order to make humans more willing to accept robots and other automated computational devices, creating them to display emotion will be a help, since if we like them, we will, no doubt, be more willing to welcome them. We might even pay dearly to have them. But do artificial affects deceive? Will they catch us with our defenses down, and do we have to worry about Plato's caveat in the Republic that one of the best ways to be unjust is to appear just? Automated agents that seem like persons might appear congenial, even as any moral regard is ignored, making them dangerous culprits indistinguishable from automated "friends." In this light, machine ethics might demand that we exercise great caution in using affective computing. In radical cases, it might even demand that we not use it at all.

We would seem to have here a quandary. No doubt there are others. The purpose of this volume is to explore the range of ethical issues related to affective computing. Is affective computing necessary for making artificial agents moral? If so, why and how? Where does affective computing require moral caution? In what cases do benefits outweigh the moral risks? Etc.

Invited Authors:

• Roddy Cowie (Queen's University, Belfast)
• Luciano Floridi (University of Hertfordshire and University of Oxford)
• Matthias Scheutz (Tufts University)

Papers must not have been previously published, with the exception that substantial extensions of conference papers can be considered. The authors will be required to follow the Author’s Guide for manuscript submission to the IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing at http://www.computer.org/portal/web/tac/author. Papers are due by March 1st, 2011, and should be submitted electronically at https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/taffc-cs. Please select the "SI - Ethics 2011" manuscript type upon submission. For further information, please contact guest editor, Anthony Beavers at afbeavers@gmail.com.

"The First Church of Robotics"

Today's New York Times includes an op-ed piece by Jaron Lanier bemoaning what I'd call the metaphysical pretensions of artificial intelligence - including the term itself, how it is used to make technologies seem more impressive than they are, and, most importantly, how the combination changes the way we think about ourselves. As Lanier writes, "by allowing artificial intelligence to reshape our concept of personhood, we are leaving ourselves open to the flipside: we think of people more and more as computers, just as we think of computers as people."

Lanier compares Ray Kurzweil's idea of "the Singularity" to a religion, observing that "a great deal of the confusion and rancor in the world today concerns tension at the boundary between religion and modernity,"and wondering whether these tensions would be eased a bit if technologists were less messianic.

I think Lanier's ideas are valid and worth contemplating, but I'll take the general train of thought on a slight detour. One of the objectives of AI research has been to make machines think like people. This has often driven researchers to try to understand how people actually think - how our brain, mind, emotions, and body interact to form thoughts, premises, conclusions, convictions, beliefs, and all the rest; even how we recognize a person's identity from her or his face.

The more I learn about AI and human psychology - and I have learned only a very small amount about either - the more convinced I am that AI research not only mystifies our understanding of human nature (as Lanier recognizes), but has potential to clarify it.

Lanier writes:

In fact, the nuts and bolts of A.I. research can often be more usefully interpreted without the concept of A.I. at all. For example, I.B.M. scientists recently unveiled a “question answering” machine that is designed to play the TV quiz show “Jeopardy.” Suppose I.B.M. had dispensed with the theatrics, declared it had done Google one better and come up with a new phrase-based search engine. This framing of exactly the same technology would have gained I.B.M.’s team as much (deserved) recognition as the claim of an artificial intelligence, but would also have educated the public about how such a technology might actually be used most effectively.

To me, this is also an example of how computers do not think like human beings, and that trying to make them think like us might be useful heuristically, but isn't really a desirable goal in and of itself. Why spend so much money trying to make more things that think like people when we already have several billion people who are already experts?

Perhaps we should recognize, and emphasize, that "artificial intelligence" only resembles human intelligence insofar as it can solve some problems only humans have  been able to solve heretofore. For the moment, I have yet to be convinced that AI is more than a really sophisticated hand-held calculator. We aren't metaphysically threatened by machines that can do arithmetic thousands of times faster and more accurately than ourselves; why should we be threatened by a handful of machines that seem to be able to hold a semi-coherent conversation with us under very narrow circumstances?

Ken Pimple, PAIT Program Director

"Computing Ethics: Work Life in the Robotic Age"

In this column, published in the July 2010 issue of Communications of the ACM, Jason Borenstein warns of the economic displacement that advances in robotics might entail and urges the robotics community to "be diligent in dealing with emerging ethical issues."

Ken Pimple, PAIT Project Director

"Computers Learn to Listen, and Some Talk Back"

One occupational hazard of being an ethicist is a tendency to dwell on the unethical, dangerous, and otherwise undesirable features of any given phenomenon. This story published on the New York Times Web site reminds me why advances in robotics, artificial intelligence, and computing are exciting as well as (sometimes) scary. I found the accompanying time line, "Building Smarter Machines," ranging from 1936 to 2009, particularly compelling. Both are a part of the "Smarter Than You Think" series.

Ken Pimple, PAIT Project Director